The Thing About College Football Coaches

From Saban to maybe even Paterno, why we love coaches is why we hate them, but it's impossible to hate Joe Moglia

Most Read

What is it about those totems of the American Saturday sideline? They've grabbed us, college-football coaches have, and we've reciprocated, holding few public figures in higher regard. Some remnant of a foregone masculinity, maybe. In any case they are father figures, to us and to their players, those boys who show up on campus, in many instances, fatherless. Their message is replicated, and our response relentless; when these men fail us, we heap upon them the scorn of wronged sons.

And so college football programs — and their fans — become near-perfect reflections of their coaches. Joe Paterno's teams, at least until that bitter end, were hard-nosed and smart, just like their Brooklyn-born, Brown-educated leader.

Nick Saban's Alabama teams are fundamentally sound — his offensive lines almost never make mistakes — because Nick Saban is a perfectionist. Witness him on the sideline in the latter stages of this Saturday's 52-0 mauling of Arkansas, castigating his third-stringers as if the outcome of the game — even the world — depended upon their performances.

Lane Kiffin, who left the University of Tennessee in a lurch to chase the sun and money at USC, seems paranoid. He recently banned a reporter from covering the team because the man had disclosed an injury to a kicker (the reporter has since been reinstated). Kiffin's players, accordingly, plays scared. They choke, as they did this week, to an Andrew Luck-less Stanford squad, 21-14.

And then there is Joe Moglia, the 63-year-old in his first season as a college head coach, at Coastal Carolina, who is painstakingly trying to mold a foundering program into his own image, which he sums up — with great frequency — in three words: "Be a man."

He has always wanted to be a coach, and he had worked his way up, through high schools and small college programs. By 1983, at age 33, he was the defensive coordinator at Dartmouth, where, through some minor miracle, he'd produced one of the best defenses in the East and an Ivy League champion. That year he was offered a job on the defensive staff of the defending national champion Miami Hurricanes, the next step on any perfect coaching ladder.

And so Joe Moglia declined the perfect job.

A divorce from the woman he married at age 19 left him with four kids to take care of, something he could not do on a salary of $33,000. He decided he'd find a job on Wall Street, an implausible leap for someone with no training or experience in finance. But through the will and the way of that football coach's personality, he made his way in. A 17-year career at Merrill Lynch led to the CEO job at the online broker TD Ameritrade. There, he deftly sidestepped the financial crisis in 2008, the year Merrill lost $28 billion and his main competitor, E-Trade, lost $1.3 billion. Moglia made a profit of $800 million; his employees called him "coach."

And so Joe Moglia quit again.

At age 60, he decided it was time to chase the dream he'd deferred nearly three decades earlier. Moglia wanted to become a college head coach. And despite his background, and his success, no one would hire him. No one took him seriously. He'd been out of the game for too long.

Three years into an increasingly desperate search, he finally got a job, with the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers, a program in need of a fresh start. Moglia rid the team of its academic underachievers and malcontents; he wanted only a team of boys who would take the challenge of becoming men.

And so the rebuilding team has worked, at least so far. They Chanticleers are off to an unlikely 2-1 start, highlighted by a come-from-behind, triple-overtime win at Furman. Moglia has miles to go before he owns a program like Saban and Kiffin, before he grabs a remnant of the success he saw on Wall Street. But it remains the unlikeliest of likable Wall Street tales, and Joe Moglia the most lovable of our many loved coaches.